Yes, this is huge indeed! Was on the front page once before with our website and it crashed the server. 
In my experience controversial (somehow non-random) comments work the best. 
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Gotta love it. 
This is totally a face palm moment. 
I remember the constantant battles many of us fought in the past that resulted in little more than naysaying and disbelief about even the possibility of success. 
Downplaying everything we as a community were trying to achieve. Moments as grand and as satifying as this are few and far between. 
Let’s savour it!! 
To all that said it could’nt happen… 
hhhmmmmmmmmmm… WRONG!!! 
Remember that spanish crypto discussion with all of those disrespectful narrow minded kids!? – @Digipl 's battle --? Look it up. 
Here is a big fat pole of humility for them to suck on!!! 
The zen master @dirvine wont say it, but I WILL!!! 
Not . only . is . it . solved . we . have . now . set . the . STANDARD!!! 
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yeah, remember this thread ? that was so painful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8080736
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We should gather these. Place them in ONE thread. They deserve to go down in history. Let’s Immortalize their mental rigidity.
EVERYONE PLEASE HELP!!! 
I BEG OF YOU!!! 
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Not seen that thread before… but, reading the criticisms gives me uncontrollable and roaring belly laughs…
HAHAHAHAHAHAH
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Ideally this means that an attacker’s nodes need to have done just as much work as 1/3 of the entire network has done over time.
Now PARSEC won’t be used in SAFE to let the entire network communicate and come into global consensus like for example Bitcoin does, instead PARSEC will be used by many small sections of the network to reach “local” consensus for the corresponding section of the network. The obvious attack vector here is to join one section with many nodes of your own to hijack that particular section. The idea is to make this attack infeasible by having the network occasionally relocate nodes (when they age/rank up), so an attacker doesn’t have control over in what sections of the network its nodes are located. If this idea works as well in practice as it does in theory, attacking a section is about as hard as attacking the entire network (all the sections).
Just like as in Bitcoin an attacker with minority hashpower might rollback a part of the blockchain’s history by getting a lucky streak in mining, an attacker here could get lucky in relocations of its nodes (it’s a random process). This means that especially an untargeted attack (any section would do) could probably be done with somewhat less work (farming) than 1/3 of the total.
What this ultimately means is that farming needs to become quite decentralised where hopefully no party will ever control a double digit percentage of the vaults (nodes) of the network. There are good arguments to be made why SAFE farming won’t be as susceptible to centralising forces as Bitcoin mining, but there’s no way to be sure of that in advance. We’ll just have to try and see.
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Hey, thanks for the clear explanation. I noticed a couple of naysayers on twitter bringing this up and figured the answer would be something like this but didn’t have quite the info to back it up.
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It’s a very valid question, proof-of-work is inherently resistant to sybil attacks while PARSEC on its own isn’t, so to tell the story properly the random but deterministic relocating of nodes needs to be included.
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Would have loved to be a fly on the wall to see the expression of the person coming up with the acronym PARSEC and realized just how perfect it was.
Great job MaidSafe, next Safe devcon will be something else.
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So it’s basically a combination of PARSEC, node aging, close group consensus, datachains, XOR based networking, chunking, self encryption, auto authentication and cryptography that make it secure to most known attacks. Sort of strength in depth.
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I am again going to ask a silly question again so apologies in advance but I am a keen follower of this project and like to clarify things along the way from a non-technical perspective.
Will PERSEC implementation in other projects like DAG, IOTA etc help maidsafe coin? or is it non-dependant ie anyone can use PERSEC with no effect on SAFE network itself. I am just trying to tie the huge development of PERSEC to maidsafe potential price appreciation or are these independent events?
Thanks in advance.
Personal fave from that 2014 article posted above:
‘‘It sounds like they are reinventing Freenet. Badly. Not realizing how hard some things are. Instead, they make big claims. Where’s the code?’’
As many have said, amazing work, hats off to all the team. 
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In Figure 1 and 2 in the paper, I see alice, bob, carol and dave. I get that alice and bob are standard, but carol and dave also? If not, I would go with david. Or are there too many of them? I know, not important, but I notice things like that.
Edit: David is an established option, according to wikipedia.
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It is theoretically non-dependent. However, especially in crypto, hype and perception are a large part of the value of the coin. If IOTA all of the sudden made an announcement that they were switching to this new PARSEC algo for consensus, that would be a big perception win for Maidsafe, especially with the large market share IOTA holds. That, in turn, would likely mean higher trust in the project and higher value placed on the coin.
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PARSEC is the unifying component of many components that will make the network function. Price is influced beacuse the project has been de-risked. It also sets a precedent for the industry because MAIDSAFE has created a new standard. This is already leading to new interest. The Open sourcing of PARSEC will draw even more attention to MAIDSAFE, and thus the price of the coin will follow.
But what if folks just get interested in PARSEC and dont join the SAFE network. Some indirect link would help in my opinion. I am just curious because if another company uses PARSEC and creates a solution for decentralized storage - that would affect MAIDSAFE and all the work they’ve done on PARSEC. Again I am a non-technical person so please excuse my ignorance.
Edit: MAIDSafe is actually mentioned by this guy! in the 12th minute…
I feel a TED talk should be done at some point.
This guy talks about how the dark net is going main stream…
Thats legal use for privacy.
If people spend the time to download TOR browsers,
people will absolutely be willing to down a SAFENet browser to
benefit from all the features.
TOR fills in some gaps, but SAFENetwork will bring home a connected world.
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Well, even with open source licensing, there has to be credit given in the final product licensing to the third parties’ products they utilized when creating their product. Such that, if IOTA used PARSEC, they would have to denote that in their licensing.
However, there is really no “linking” between projects. Being open source under the licensing model Maidsafe has chosen to utilize means they will receive no direct funding from usage of PARSEC, or any other open source piece utilized in other development projects.
You are correct, though, in being concerned over another project taking their work and making a project with it that overshadows MAID, even though MAID would have done a bulk of the heavy lifting for the back-end consensus model, and any additional pieces they may have taken from MAID’s open sourcing efforts. The first past the post does not always a winner make in development projects.
Many companies have had an idea and implementation first, just to be beaten out by the second or third competitor to come along. Think of Microsoft. They were late to the OS game, and in many people’s opinions had stolen work, and had an inferior product to a lot of other OS’s in their early days (hell, even today). Yet, they dominated the market and eventually became the defacto OS.
The one upside to the Maidsafe project is, as far as I am aware, they are really the only ones attempting to develop such an all-encompassing product. Many competitors like IOTA, Sia, Storj, etc, are implementing pieces of what Maidsafe intends to be at the end. I don’t foresee anyone beating Maidsafe to their goal at this point, unless some big player like Google or Microsoft have been developing something similar under wraps for several years.
The only real question, in my mind, is will people use it? I feel confident at this point that they will complete their project, or at least their initial intended goals, and release the SAFE network. I feel confident that users of Tor, the black markets, and perhaps even P2P like Bittorrent will abandon their networks for SAFE. That would be enough to push SAFECoin to make a pretty hefty profit for those that believe in the product. It’s the day to day users I worry about. Baby boomers and GenX. Will they buy in? I think Facebook’s recent troubles have been a Godsend for Maidsafe. Personal privacy has finally come to the front pages of the news all across the world. I’m just hoping we can sustain this wakeup call long enough for the SAFE network to get its legs under it.
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Safe to assume as the network grows the lower the probability of this becoming an issue
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Like the 51%+ attack that happened with the small Bitcoin Gold last week, but very expensive and difficult to do ‘out of the blue’ with Bitcoin, I think.